A tough, versatile, and top of the line team. Working in an Agile shop and using PHP to both develop and automate their infrastructure. A laid-back team willing and able to shift drastically to meet both internal and external client needs. Not to mention their application and services is unique!

Cons

The small team size places a lot of strain on resources, similar to how most start-ups work. The strain is fun, although if your a JR or non-C-level/ non-senior employee their compensation may not be competitive enough to encourage employer retention.

-You can move within Amazon if you want
- Great healthcare (c/o Amazon)
-Teams generally have a positive "we are all in this together" attitude, even when things are crazy. So camaraderie is one reason I stayed for so long (more than 3 years). People make a real effort to work together to make things happen, even if there are lots of technical/managerial roadblocks

Cons

-Management is still going through lots of course changes even though the Amazon merger is years old at this point. This provides a pretty unstable working environment and it's hard to succeed when the focus of your department is redirecting every 3 months. It's also just exhausting and not in that "we're a start up and all hands on deck" (aka productive) kind of way.
- Culture and values are great on paper but not...

Consistently toxic environment both before and after the Amazon acquisition, chronic mismanagement, extremely poor hiring decisions on a management level and a reluctance to fix these issues even when they create obvious problems, a pervasive sense of dishonesty from the top down.

Definitely a fun environment to work in, flexible schedule (barring any, rare, emergencies), and very good benefits. The staff are a lot of really excited people who want to do great things for comic books and solve big problems.
Integration with Amazon offers a lot of really cool benefits as far as what can be used to solve problems. Working with Amazon also allows for a lot of potential upward movement and opportunity...

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Cons

comiXology is incredibly ambitious and because of that there's a lot to be done with stretched resources. Team sizes are good but 2+ years into the Amazon acquisition, only some of the growing pains are gone. The turnover of long time staff cashing in post-aqusition has left some knowledge lost which tends to lead to overhauls of small pieces of infrastructure with unforeseen effects causing other small pieces to malfunction.

Advice to Management

Recognize your developers more--not just from direct managers. Many achievements and successes are glossed over when a simple "good job" email to a direct contributor would do wonders.

The positives of working for comixology are somewhat obvious. You get some access to free digital comics if you are into that sort of thing, the employee culture is good, even if the management culture is not, and you are working for Amazon, so if you have a tremendous amount of personal drive and fortitude, you may be able to parlay a job at comixology to a job elsewhere within Amazon but it won't be easy.
The CEO...

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Cons

The single biggest issue at this company is that virtually everyone in senior management -- except the CEO -- has no idea what they are doing. They do not understand the business they are in, decisions are made on the basis of either "CYA" or "Amazon is doing this so we have to do it too."
Don't look for any leadership or direction from the management team as there isn't any to be found. Any ideas -- rare as they...

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Advice to Management

Stop trying to be Amazon. Hire Sr managers who actually understand the business and what customers actually want. The spirit of innovation is all but gone and is really no longer fostered. The new direction is simply "do what Amazon is doing" right up to re-using things that other Amazon teams have done with little to no room for anything new or unique.

There were free bagels on Wednesdays but even that was used as a guilt tactic by management.

Cons

Exploited young employees looking for an opportunity to follow their passion for comics were crushed into slave wages and tedious work. Ambition was poison as there is no room to grow and creativity was viewed as a threat to culture. Management was willfully ignorant of the community and products they were serving and valued political mind games over hard work and knowledge. Incompetent employees in favored departments...

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Advice to Management

The problems felt so deeply ingrained I'm not sure what could be done. I tried my hardest to eight some wrongs but felt that the resistance against my ideas was coming from a power struggle with management. I believe some early issues with employees tainted their view and it made me feel that I was approached with distrust or that they felt I had a secret agenda, which was giving me too much credit. Don't treat employees...